Under a microscope, carefully arranged diatoms form a dazzling display.

Diatoms are single-celled algae (in the stramenopile supergroup) that live in sunny, wet habitats. The organisms come in many shapes and sport natural pigments of green, gold and brown. To complete their look, diatoms extract silica, a mineral used in glass, from the water and erect intricate outer skeletons. The...

Rapid climate change put mega-sized Ice Age mammals on the ropes before ancient humans delivered the final blow, new research indicates.

During Earth’s last glacial period, around 12,000 to 110,000 years ago, woolly mammoths, sedan-sized armadillos and other massive mammals walked the land. Over time, these megafauna mostly died out. The instigator of these extinctions has become a topic...

Sea levels are rising around the world, and they will continue to do so as glaciers and ice sheets melt and the world’s oceans undergo thermal expansion. How much rise will occur is still unknown — one study published online this week contends it could be as much as three...

Carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels threaten the method’s ability to definitively pinpoint the age of organic materials, new research suggests. The extra carbon flooding the atmosphere dilutes the relative number of radioactive carbon atoms that are vital to the dating method. By 2050, the age of fresh organic matter...

A plethora of phytoplankton kick up clouds in the Southern Ocean, researchers report July 17 in Science Advances.

The tiny ocean critters release organic matter and sulfates, which get whipped into the air and seed cloud formation. Those clouds reflect sunlight, helping to cool the planet. Using satellite data and...

El Niño, a weather disruption caused by unusually warm seawater in the eastern Pacific, kicked off in March and could become a whopper, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center reported July 9. The agency...

Climate change is setting the world on fire. Between 1979 and 2013, the duration of wildfire seasons increased across 25.3 percent of Earth’s vegetated surface, with net gains on every continent except Australia and Antarctica, researchers report online July 14 in Nature Communications.